We could really use a way to have very specific control of admin panel functions. As the community/project grows you need to bring more people onbord. Giving these people full-blown admin panel access is a serious risk to your site an business.

I'm not talking about moderation here (although that needs work too). But for example it would be nice to grant certain SE users (temp) access to the layout manager, without anything else, the user list and ability to login as other users for example!!!

If we are talking about a serious upgrade there are 3 major things. I won't include any requests that can be done with custom modifications or plugins.

1. Migration from Mootools to JQuery. Both are great, but currently JQuery is muh more popular. There are more interesting libraries and scripts done with it. This switch will give a serious push for 3rd party plugins. Right now some developers already include JQuery, which I think isn't the best idea.

2. New Layout. A fresh look will be nice. But also layout that is responsive considering demand for mobile apps.

3. Zend Framework 2. Currently Zend Framework 1 is used. It's no longer under development. ZF2 is faster and under active development. Using ZF2 will mean a serious rewrite of SocialEngine, but it's definitely worth it.